Kalpana Chawla

When Kalpana Chawla was a little girl in Karnal, Haryana, she loved to watch planes fly high above her town. She drew planes in her notebooks and once even in the dirt with a stick.

She studied engineering in India, then moved to the United States, worked at NASA, and became the first woman born in India to travel into outer space. She flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia not once but twice, and inspired children — especially girls — everywhere to dream past the sky.

Kalpana Chawla was born in 1962 in Karnal, Haryana. She earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Punjab Engineering College, then master's and doctoral degrees in the United States, specialising in fluid dynamics.

She joined NASA and, in 1997, flew aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-87 as a mission specialist, becoming the first woman of Indian origin in space.

On her second mission, STS-107, she and six crewmates conducted many experiments over sixteen days. On 1 February 2003, as Columbia was re-entering Earth's atmosphere, damage to the shuttle's heat shield caused it to break apart, and the entire crew was lost.

Kalpana was thirty-nine years old. Schools, scholarships, weather satellites and even a mountain range on Mars have been named after her, and her story continues to inspire young Indians who look up at the sky and see themselves in it.